Blog

Do We Travel to Get There or Get There to Travel?

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in transportation to demonstrate that you go someplace because you want to get there. But it definitely helps to have a Ph.D. if you want to demonstrate that you get someplace because you want to go. This far less intuitive hypothesis has been explored by Patricia L. Mokhtarian of the University of California at Davis, one of my favorite transportation thinkers, and her collaborators.

Last time, I highlighted a paper from Mokhtarian and Lothlorien S. Redmond, which found that, on average, workers have an “ideal” trip to work of 16 minutes, with very few survey respondents expressing the wish that the commute would go away entirely. This suggests that the traditional view of travel – as a necessary evil – might have to be rethought.

In another paper, this time written in collaboration with Ilan Salomon of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mokhtarian looked at both theory and evidence on how travel itself can be a positive.

We benefit from travel in three ways. First, barring perhaps a few special cases like a ride to San Quentin on the prison bus, we get some positive “utility” (economist-ese for personal fulfillment) from what we do at the destination. In traditional transportation thinking, this is the only benefit from a trip that gets counted.

But there’s a second kind of benefit, which involves the stuff we do while we’re on the move. Auto travel has come a long way since I was a kid, when whiling away the hours in the back seat involved low-tech “thrills” like screaming when an oncoming car was missing a headlight, calling out out-of-state license plates, and figuring out new and creative ways to squabble with my brothers. Today, thanks to technology, the number of activities we can undertake in the car – from satellite radio to college courses on CD to (kids, don’t try this at home) texting behind the wheel is mushrooming. The authors refer to this as “carcooning.”

And the joys of what we can do in the car are perhaps surpassed only by the joys of the activities we can’t do in the car. For many of us, time behind the wheel is the only part of the day where people can’t hector us to do work of some sort. Who doesn’t need occasional quiet time to decompress and space out?

It might be argued that NPR, Bruce Springsteen and McRib may make a trip more pleasurable, but that doesn’t mean we love travel itself, just the things we can do to take our mind off travel.

But for many, travel – even pointless travel from A to B and back to A again – is a pleasure, not a chore. After all, don’t people pay good money to break their legs sliding down? icy mountains, spend hours roasting in line at Six Flags, rise at 3 in the morning and schlep an unwieldy polyurethane fiberglass board into frigid water, hang their heads over the rail in a squall, and much more (waterskiing, skydiving, snowmobiling, skateboarding, bicycling, off-roading, horseback riding and jogging) just to feel the thrill of speed and the landscape passing by? Isn’t driving part of the same family of activities?

And then there’s curiosity. Where would man be without that age-old desire to explore and gain a feeling of mastery over new worlds, just for the sake of it? Inside every one of us, isn’t there a little Vasco de Gama wanting to plant his flag on a new antique store or dive bar? Maybe the need to strike out and conquer new worlds has something to do with our hunter gatherer ancestors needing a yearning to move on to fresh pastures to search for richer food sources. Or maybe the world is lucky I didn’t go into anthropology.

There’s another basic human instinct involved: the need to keep things fresh. Even if we had the best restaurant in the city next door, most of us would sometimes travel to more distant ones for the sake of variety – variety in the destination, to be sure, but also variety in the trip.

So much for the theory; what’s the evidence? Measuring these phenomena is decidedly tricky. Even if it is possible to figure out how much utility a person reaps from a particular trip, it is no small order to have to disentangle the relative contributions of these three types of pleasure.

Indeed, most trips probably involve a combination of the three, which varies based on trip type and personal taste. An identical trip might even have different shares of each type of pleasure. You might want to see a specific movie on a specific IMAX screen, which means the destination is really the important thing. On the other hand, you might decide you want to make a trip (have you ever asked “Where should we go tonight?” on a Saturday evening?) and then settled on that movie and that theater. In that case, it may be the trip that accounts for much of the fun.

Despite these conceptual difficulties, Mokhtarian and her collaborators have complemented their theoretical work with empirical investigations of people’s attitudes towards travel, and have come up with some interesting results about why we love the phenomenon even as we hate it. More soon.

RPMcSweeney

December 8, 2010 @ 5:42pm

Lothlorien S. Redmond! By Gandalf's beard, what a name!

Wilma

December 8, 2010 @ 5:55pm

When I was in high school my friends and I used to literally JUST drive around for a few hours each Friday and Saturday night. We could never think of any particular destination but we did always love spending the time in that Dodge truck

Joe

December 8, 2010 @ 6:11pm

My family has a distinction between being "lost" and "not knowing where you are" in relation to car trips. We consider "being lost" as the inability to get to your destination (usually within a time constraint) while "not knowing where you are" is an opportunity to explore new places. According to our kids, another distinction is that my wife tends to get lost while I tend to not know where we are.

I'm guessing that there might be gender differences in the enjoyment of car travel. I tend to value long car trips with the whole family because it's getting rarer that we get everyone together in a small space for a length of time. My wife considers it a hassle at best.

Mike B

December 8, 2010 @ 6:28pm

Personally I can't stand driving. It is stressful and the slightest mistake could end up costing me lots of money or even my life. However I don't mind public rail transport and when I have been able to use it to commute I found it relaxing, interesting and it also provides an opportunity to catch some sleep which can then be deducted from the time of the day that is normally wasted by sleep.

Steven

December 8, 2010 @ 6:29pm

I once held a job that was about 65 miles away from where I lived. I got so used to driving it everyday that I would someone get anxious on Saturdays and go feel the need to drive around. I left that job 5 years ago but I still get the urge every once in a while to just go drive to a remote destination just so I'll have time behind the wheel.

Thomas Laussermair

December 8, 2010 @ 6:43pm

Often we travel not to get somewhere, but to do the trip. There is no utility at the destination so much as utility in the experience of getting there.

This is especially true for muscle-powered travel, on foot, bicycle, by boat, you name it - as one travels slowly and gets to experience the outdoors much more intensely than from within a car.

Many people have cycled around the globe. Think about it: They wouldn't have to do this just to get to where they started from. It's the journey that is the destination!

Me too, I have cycled from Alaska to Patagonia over the last year, and while I enjoyed traveling to get there, the main purpose of my getting there was to travel.

Karen H.

December 8, 2010 @ 6:54pm

If you have a pleasant drive it can be a wonderful bridge from work and home (especially if you have kids at home!) But a long commute on public transit, especially if you have to stand, to get to a quiet and cozy home is horrible....like everything else in life, it just is relative...

Mantonat

December 8, 2010 @ 7:22pm

"Brother, I love to drive." - from Raising Arizona

Sometimes I leave my office on my lunch break and just drive around.

Brad

December 8, 2010 @ 7:45pm

If you want to enjoy getting there, get your pilot's license. Not only will you enjoy the trip, you'll get there faster, too.

PaulD

December 8, 2010 @ 7:52pm

I was going to say something like what Thomas Laussermair said -- but he said it better.

164

December 8, 2010 @ 7:53pm

As a counter point, why do so many of us fly to destinations that we could drive? Surely it is not possible to attribute utility to the journey. The TSA experience, followed by cattle car flights, with just a glimmer of hope to be offered bag of nuts and a sip of soda on a delayed flight.

Jon

December 8, 2010 @ 8:22pm

I live about 20 miles outside of New York City, and while the thought of driving to the city day in and out (where a stretch 20 miles long on the L.I.E. in peak afternoon traffic can net a 2+ hour drive), the commute by train is an ultimately relaxing experience. The express train takes <30 minutes and affords the chance to read the paper/iPad/Kindle/book, etc., listen to music, sleep, or simply collect one's thoughts before the work day begins. In a competitive work environment like NYC this is should be explored as a net benefit.

Eileen Wyatt

December 8, 2010 @ 8:28pm

@164 (#11): One reason to fly rather than drive to a destination that could be reached either way is time spent in concentrated activity.

Phoenix to Los Angeles is about 6 hours in the car, during which time I must give driving my full attention. Or it's an hour on the plane, plus an hour or so coping with the airport -- but most of that time, I can zone out and do my own work.

As it happens, I routinely drive because the cash cost of the plane + rental car is much higher than just driving it, plus there are intermediate destinations I want to visit. But many of my colleagues prefer to fly.

If it's a commuter-plane puddle-jumper destination as the last leg of a flight through a nearby larger city, often including that last leg is cheaper and faster than switching to rental car or train, so if I don't need a car at the destination, of course I take the plane the whole way.

Heather

December 8, 2010 @ 8:36pm

I have a 30-mile one-way commute, which I used to do only three days a week, and it wasn't so bad, except when there was an unusual amount of traffic and then I would get stressed out about being late. Now that I have to do it five days a week, though, it's awful.

I do agree with 164, though. We're driving from southeastern Indiana to Orlando in a couple of days. By the time you figure in gas, hotels and extra meals, we're not saving much money over flying, but we are saving a lot of stress and aggravation.

And about the restaurant in the next town: We once drove four hours to Chicago just to get a Giordano's pizza for lunch, and then turned around and drove the four hours home.

elSurrealista

December 8, 2010 @ 9:06pm

I can not deny that individuals who enjoy driving will always get a benefit from it, or those who make a peacefull trip with beautiful scenery will do as well (Although, I do not think this benefit comes properly from driving but from contemplation or relaxation. Intrinsically related to driving but not the properly cause of benefit)

I think the theory is very narrow to specific types of trips and specific motives for the trip. Lets start by defining a car trip. We can assume that a 1 hour journey could be consider as a trip. Well, in that case, I always make a trip when I drive to work. I cant afford living next to the office, and I think I'm not the only one. Especially if you work in a big city. Then, the driving becomes an obligation with high possibilities to get jamed in traffic, accumulating stress, discomfort with the only desire to get home and relax.

To me, it seems obvious that if you like to drive you will benefit, if you're going on a quiet road for vacations you will enjoy it. But if you are going on a trip for work, even if you have the peacefull road, you might only benefit from the work you're going to do at your destination.

Surely, I might be wrong. I just hate driving because most of the time I have to.

Read more...

Grumpy

December 8, 2010 @ 9:08pm

Could this actually be a barrier against working from home? The 10 second commute from the bedroom to the desk is not going to be satisfying to very many people, it seems.

Olivier

December 9, 2010 @ 4:27am

Makes sense ; if it was just about the destination, these guys http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/?o=RrzKj&doc_id=7589&v=8m would have taken the plane

Josh

December 9, 2010 @ 4:58am

That's what I was thinking about when I thought of Virgin Galactic's new SpaceShip Two. You are on a trip with no destination. You pay for a trip to the same spot you started. Even if the route is indeed the most scenic of all.

www.philstockworld.com

Joe

December 9, 2010 @ 6:07am

hence the popularity of working from starbucks. you get your 10 minute commute and a bit of white noise.

Nylund

December 9, 2010 @ 6:44am

When I lived in NYC my friends knew they could rely on me to accompany them anytime they had to go someplace by train, be it Philly, New Haven, etc. just because I really enjoyed getting on a train and going someplace, anyplace.

Now that I'm older, its pretty common for the wife and I to pick some random camping spot just so we have an excuse to throw the tent in the car and go for a long drive and explore as we go.